On freedom of self, and freedom from self

There is a puzzling but important relationship between us and ourselves.

Even that statement sounds peculiar, but we all know what it means to say, regarding some New Year's resolution, "I couldn't get myself to do that."

Or maybe, "I found myself doing exactly what I didn't want to do."

How can we make sense of this? I think I found a way, and am curious what others think.

It seems to me, like so much of life, that there is a property here that depends on the time-scale or "zoom factor" used.

In the short run, say the course of a day or two, "we" (you know who you are, the one reading this) are basically captive to our "selves". This "self" has a lot of inertia, and maybe it is carried around by the animal host we inhabit or are associated with from birth.

In any case, way more than we like to admit, we are pretty much predetermined in the short run by the operant conditioned and habit-driven self. This is not such a bad deal, as anyone who ever fell asleep on a horse, or semi-sleep at the steering wheel, felt when looking up and realizing they had ended up at home.

So, short run, "we" are captives of the "self."

But, long run, provided (big if) we can maintain constancy of effort and purpose, we can reshape and remold the self into a different self.

So, like silly-putty (or starch-colloid), if we try to move it slowly, it flows; if we try to move it rapidly, it is like a rock.

Now the last part of this puzzle is that life is very noisy on many scales. So, it is good that we have a "self" to stabilize us across the vast range of impulses and things that look enticing at that second. But we are also faced with noise on the long-term scale. If we float free, we cannot maintain constancy, or even a sense of direction.

So, the only way to be "free" of self is to connect up with a larger social group that has a much larger intertial "self" than our own. Then, we can maintain constancy long enough, with the help of our new friends, to overcome and retrain and recondition our "self" to something different.

Except that, even then we are not totally "free", as we had to partially adapt the life of the social group we used as a reference. Within that domain, we are "free" to reshape ourselves,
over the long haul, which in turn will dominate "us" in the short run.

Stephen Covey ("The 7 habits of highly effective people" and "the 8th Habit") talks about the "freedom to play the piano" -- which is a freedom in the long run that has to be earned by diligent sacrifice and obedience and subjecting oneself to discipline in the short run.

But, without the short run sacrifices, we never end up with the long-term freedom to play the piano as we desire.

There is also the idea of freedom within a corporation or large group, where the most freedom is obtained by being willing to take part in a two-part deal -- we allow ourselves to be dominated by some authority, and the authority in turn allows itself to be guided by us and by it's perception of our interests and well being (not its own.) If BOTH parts are there, and both parties agree to be subject to that restriction, then ALL of us become free to be powerful.

These are restrictions like bones, that make a runner able to go faster than a jellyfish, by having rigid parts. Rigor frees us, rigidity may or may not bind us.

anyway, something to mull over.